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18 December 2005

Dyspepsia 101

Over at the Sun chain, the Conservative party campaign chair in Atlantic Canada still gets his column to spew his unique views about unfulfilled political promises.

That tells you something about the Sun's views on fairness and balance in its editorial pages. For the record, a dyspeptic former Liberal cabinet minister doesn't balance off an active campaigner like Crosbie.

John Crosbie, the former federal overlord in Newfoundland and Labrador, seems to forget his 1979 federal budget. There was no promise of a gasoline excise tax in the 1979 campaign, but Crosbie walloped taxpayers with an 18 cent a gallon excise tax on it just the same.

Stephen Harper - the guy who appointed Crosbie to the campaign chair job - called that stupid.

According to Jeff Simpson's The discipline of power, Crosbie originally wanted a 30 cent a gallon hike in taxes.

Meanwhile, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians continue to deal with the folly of Joe Smallwood at Stephenville and the subsequent folly of his successor Conservative government with Crosbie as finance minister that nationalized the Upper Churchill project and the Stephenville linerboard mill.

Coming up...

August 3

This is your political life: Ross Wiseman

Finance minister Ross Wiseman is the latest provincial Conservative to announce that he won't be running in the November general election. On Monday, SRBP will take a look back at three moments in Wiseman's political career that define the man and his political legacy.

Date TBA

Lions or Jellyfish: a review

Ray Blake's new book is in the stores or available from University of Toronto Press online. Blake examines the relationship between the provincial government in St. John's and the federal government through eight episodes from Term 29, through resettlement, to hydroelectricity, to the offshore, Meech Lake, and Equalization.

Date TBA

Changing the direction. Changing the tone.

The party that forms government after the November general election will face significant challenges from its first minutes in office. One of them will be changing the relationship between the provincial government and the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. In an upcoming series of posts, SRBP will look at the challenge of managing the government's relationships with the public.